Notorious ***** (1946, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Leopoldine Konstantin, Louis Calhern) – Classic Movie Review 233

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 end-of-the-war film noir masterpiece Notorious is one of his finest, most seductive movies. It is a devious twisted love story as much as a thrilling spy story.

It all starts with a brilliant, masterly screenplay by Ben Hecht and the luminous, resonant acting from three of his most distinguished stars on their greatest form. The ultra-tense script delivers electrifying sequences and terrific suspense, particularly towards the film’s exciting climax.

And it excites visually too. It is a ravishing looking film. Ted Tetzlaff’s black and white cinematography includes some breathtaking shots where the director is showing off his virtuosity, such as the camera swooping down a grand staircase to end up with Bergman clutching the cellar key, or the wine cellar search intercut with the champagne running out at the party upstairs, or the shot of the giant coffee cup is in the foreground with Bergman in the background. Hitchcock is inspired. It’s never ‘only a movie, Ingrid’.

Cary Grant stars as T R Devlin, an urbane but dark and dangerous FBI agent who approaches a lost but lovely soul in Alicia Huberman. Her German father has been convicted of treason against America, and she has fallen into a hell of evil ways of over-indulging in the enjoyment of alcohol and male company. She’s an alcoholic sex-fiend, in fact.

How Hitch must have enjoyed casting his loyal, loving friend Ingrid Bergman in this role! What was there about Bergman that suggested to Hitchcock that she was right for this character that seems a million miles for her real self? It’s ironic, too, that Grant and Bergman were also close friends.

So Alicia is an easy target for somebody like Devlin, who finds little difficulty in trying to persuade her to spy on a group of her father’s Nazi friends in South America. Alicia is very vulnerable and she gets much too involved with the dangerously charismatic charmer Devlin and then much too involved with the work she agrees to do for him.

A real romance develops between the two. But Devlin is an arch manipulator, willing to risk the life of the woman he loves for his plan to get her to spy on Nazi sympathiser Alexander ‘Alex’ Sebastian (Claude Rains), who is operating an espionage ring out of Rio de Janeiro. Devlin wants her to infiltrate the ring, gain Max’s confidence and then bring him to justice. A fake romance develops between these two, after Alicia convinces Alex she loves him, and they marry.

Is this for the greater good, for the safety of America or just because it’s his job?  At any rate, he is putting country first and the woman he loves second. It’s at best controversial, at worst totally dodgy and wrong.

It is a subtle, deliciously ambiguous universe, where everyone’s mixed up and morally dubious, playing out a scenario where there are no real heroes or villains and where good and evil exist in everyone.

Grant is supposed to be the hero, the romantic idol and the film’s moral centre, but his character Devlin cheerfully sends the woman he loves into mortal danger. He scarcely worries about this, until it’s almost too late. Bergman is portraying an unstable, neurotic alcoholic, a sad, masochistic victim willing to risk her life for the man she loves in a cause she doesn’t care about.

And Rains’s villain Alex, though a murdering Nazi and weirdly dominated by his monster mother, is in other respects a decent man. But he is also a weak and easily manipulated character, exactly like Bergman’s Alicia, who is also living in the shadow of her parents.

All the roles in the film, apart from Bergman’s Alicia, are unsympathetic, and she’s an alcoholic sex-fiend! And the villain Rains is more sympathetic than the hero Grant, who, although he loves Bergman, wants to put her life at risk to test it. However, Alex’s love for Alicia is a pure one and he is willing to put his life at risk for her.

Alicia and Alex share a perfect symmetry. They are the couple who should really be made for each other. But that is not going to happen because she is trying to save America and he is out to destroy it. She’s going to gain his trust and betray him. Bergman and Rains portray this all so well, so seemingly effortlessly. It’s all there in the movie, but you don’t have to think about it.

Incidentally, it is also fascinating how Hitchcock shows Bergman at her most luminous, glamorous and alluring, dressed in Edith Head gowns, even when she is supposed to be sick or drunk, while making the normally suave and cool Grant look haggard and craggy, and the usually fussy and urbane Rains look baggy eyed and old.

Madame (Leopoldine) Konstantin is marvellous as the mother in question (though actually only four years older than Rains), really imperious and chilling, memorable in one of Hitch’s long gallery of scary mothers. Is she a bit mannish? Is Rains a bit feminine? Creepily, they certainly look around the same age. They are a lot like Cary Grant and Jessie Royce Landis in North by Northwest.

Hitchcock’s usual assembly of fine character actors also includes here Louis Calhern (very smooth as Devlin’s FBI boss Paul Prescott), Reinhold Schunzel, Ivan Triesault and Moroni Olson. They are all also essential to flesh out their roles and in providing depth to their characters and texture to the film.

Hitchcock’s and Hecht’s astute plot hinges as usual on a McGuffin. This time it actually seems important and matters. It’s a brilliant idea of uranium being concealed in champagne bottles in Rains’s wine cellar. This proved both timely and risky. It was written months before the existence of the atom bomb was revealed, but it led to the real FBI putting Hitchcock under surveillance for three months as a possible spy himself!

Rains discovers that Bergman and Grant have found out about the uranium in the cellar, but too late. He creepily approaches his mother in her bedroom and wakes her up to tell her: ‘I am married to an American agent.’ The mother coolly lights a cigarette, as a faint smile passes across her face. It is a great, sexually charged scene.

However, the idea of concealing uranium in wine bottles seems incredibly far-fetched, just a movie plot device, a McGuffin. When Hitchcock and Hecht asked Nobel prize-winning scientist Dr Robert Millikan how to make an atomic bomb, he wouldn’t tell them. But he did confirm that the bomb’s main item uranium could indeed fit into wine bottles.

Louis Calhern as Devlin’s FBI boss Paul Prescott.

Two Oscar nominations marked Rains’s and Hecht’s skills. Hitchcock was nominated for the Grand Prix at Cannes, but, forever unlucky with awards, didn’t win.

‘Notorious woman of many desires! Fateful fascination! Bold intrigue!’ the famous RKO poster advertises. What’s all that about?

Hitchcock drinking champagne at the party in Notorious.

Hitchcock’s usual cameo is an hour in at the party as a guest taking a glass of champagne, around 65 minutes into the film.

Also in the cast are Reinhold Schunzel, Moroni Olsen, Ivan Triesault, Alex Minotis, Wally Brown, Gavin Gordon, Ricardo Costa, Eberhard Krumschmidt, Antonio Moreno, Frederick Ledebur, William Gordon, Charles D Brown, Peter Von Zerneck, Fred Nurney and Sir Charles Mendl.

Notorious is directed by Alfred Hitchcock, runs 101 minutes, is produced by RKO Radio Pictures, Vanguard Films and Selznick International, is released by RKO, is written by Ben Hecht, is shot in black and white by Ted Tetzlaff, is produced by Alfred Hitchcock and David O Selznick, and is scored by Roy Webb.

It was remade for TV in 1992 with John Shea and Marisa Berenson.

A beautiful new 4K restoration of Notorious is in cinemas across the UK from 9 August 2019.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 233

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